Teaching
Despite spending much of my early adulthood pursuing music, education was my first love. As I was helping my child learn to read, that spark and love of teaching reignited my childhood dream of being a teacher.
In 2008 I completed my Bachelor of Education at UVIC. To qualify for the program, I needed to satisfy the prerequisites for the Education Program, so I chose to do a semester by correspondence. During this semester I took three classes: Pre-Confederation History, Post-Confederation History, and Finite Mathematics.
Completing this undertaking required intensive time-management strategies, as I wanted to ensure that I kept pace with the suggested timelines. My target was to complete all coursework a week before the exams. Unlike the on-campus program, all three were scheduled for the same weekend rather than being spread over multiple weeks. Consequently, I needed to ensure that all of the courses were exam-ready at the same time.
I wrote two of the correspondence exams on Saturday and one on Sunday. The final prerequisites I completed on the UVIC campus. My Education degree was earned through a Post-Degree Program. This intensive program compacted the entire degree into 16-months, for which I earned a cumulative GPA of 7.77 and graduated with distinction.
Most of my teaching career took place at Strawberry Vale Elementary School, where I started as a part-time music and part-time classroom teacher. Eventually, I moved to the classroom full time, but continued to conduct the choir and collaborate on the whole-school musicals. For a few years, I was the school's Social Emotional Wellness Advocate.
Social and Emotional Wellness in Learning
I always felt that it was very important to incorporate social and emotional wellness strategies in my classroom. With this in mind, I ensured that my students felt comfortable and supported when I gave them opportunities to challenge their minds and feel successful in their learning. I filled my classroom with a variety of calming tools that students were allowed to access at any time and led them in a five-minute mindfulness session once a day.
While in the role of the school's Social Emotional Wellness Advocate, I designed and ran a professional development workshop called How to Incorporate Wellness into Your Teaching.
Music and Theatre
One of my roles was to organize and lead whole-school musicals. We made sure that all of the children had a chance to be included in the productions. Grade 4/5 students could choose to perform or be part of the stage crew, while the younger students sang all of the songs on the side and also went onto the stage for a special grade dance.
To meet fire safety regulations for the gym, while at the same time accommodating all of the students and their family members, each performance was presented twice. This entailed putting on two identical shows with two different casts, one held in the afternoon and the other in the evening.
My three-month rehearsal schedule had strict requirements at the beginning and end of the timeline. I created a rehearsal schedule for the first month to manage introducing the entire script, with its stage directions, to the students. Key performance indicators showing the pace at which each cast was learning the material then informed the next month's rehearsal schedule.
Hybrid Classroom
For the 2020/2021 school year, I volunteered to run the hybrid classroom. This meant teaching Grade 1 to 5 students who attended school for two days each week with three days of work to do at home. Because I specialized in Grades 1 and 2, I had to research the entire BC Course Curriculum for all five grades. Once I had a reasonable understanding of the material, I sourced appropriate resources and divided the information into three reportable terms with a progression of lessons for deepest understanding and multiple sets of key performance indicators to monitor progress. My ability to learn new material quickly and to translate it into tangible learning outcomes allowed me to benefit this wide variety of learners.